The Corrected Frankenstein: Twelve Preferred Readings
in the Last Draft

David Ketterer

English Language Notes, 33:1 (Sept. 1995), 23-35

[Since this article was published, the notebooks cited therein
have been published in facsimile as The Frankenstein
Notebooks, ed. Charles E. Robinson, 2 vols. (New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1996) -- Ed.]

{23} A variety of
errors, whether the responsibility of Mary and Percy Shelley, or of the
typesetter, found their way into the original 1818 publication
of Frankenstein by the London firm of Lackington, Hughes,
Harding, Mavor, & Jones. Mary Shelley was certainly aware
of textual defects; just eleven months after the January
publication her Journal entry for 20 December 1818 includes the
notation "Correct Frankenstein"1. Some of the errors survived into
the revised editions of 1823 and 1831. In preparing his very
useful edition of the 1818 text, James Rieger decided not to
make any corrections: "The text printed by Lackington has been
left intact, typographical errors and all. . . ."2 On the other
hand, in the Mary Shelley Reader version of the 1818
edition, editors Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson
explain that "we silently correct errors in spelling and
punctuation.
. . . All other emendations (e.g., the addition or
deletion or changing of a word) are indicated by brackets in or
footnotes to the text."3 Marilyn Butler takes the correcting
process one stage further in her 1993 edition: "I have adhered
to the spelling and punctuation of the original, but silently
corrected misprints, and in two places restored missing
words."4

In their 1994 edition of the 1818 text, D. L. Macdonald and
Kathleen Scherf make yet more improvements in opting to
"silently correct any typographical errors" and to
correct six "misprints in the 1818 text that [Mary] Shelley
corrected in the 1831 edition."5 These "misprints" include three
likely typographical errors and three likely mistakes for which
Mary Shelley and Percy (in so far as he read through, and
corrected and revised, Mary's Last Draft and Fair Copy) were
responsible. Macdonald and Scherf's implication that all of
these "misprints" were first corrected in the 1831 third
edition is mistaken. While two of them were first corrected in
the 1831 edition, the remaining four had previously been
corrected in a copy of the 1818 edition that Mary annotated, or
in the 1823 second edition (which appears to have been the
copytext for the 1831 edition).6

There is one final step to be taken before the 1818 text of
Frankenstein will have been improved as much as humanly
pos- {24} sible now that 144 years have passed since Mary
Shelley's death. That step depends upon collating complete
transcriptions of the Frankenstein manuscript materials
in the Bodleian Library (the surviving Last Draft, which
comprises almost all of the published text except for
Walton's opening letters to his sister and the first nine
paragraphs of Chapter 1 of Volume One, and the Fair Copy
fragments, which comprise most of the three concluding
chapters) and the 1818 edition. Since I have in fact completed
those transcription and collation tasks, I am in a position (1)
to indicate which substantive errors in the three editions of
Frankenstein are traceable to the Last Draft and, if
relevant, the Fair Copy, and (2) to propose seven substantive
corrections sanctioned by the Last Draft additional to the four
-- also, it turns out, so sanctioned -- which have already been
made, making eleven preferred readings in all which should
appear in an ideal critical text of the 1818 Frankenstein
(and most of which should also appear in ideal texts of the two
subsequent editions), and a twelfth which applies only to the
1831 edition.

For ease of reference, I relate page and line numbers (usually
within parentheses) in Rieger's edition of the 1818 text to
volume and page numbers of the Last Draft and to page numbers of
the Fair Copy. The Last Draft, it should be noted, has
frequently been misrepresented as the "rough draft"; in fact it
approaches something like a rough copy (as opposed to a fair
copy) of rough draft material which is now lost. It is
organized as two volumes, separately paginated and chapterized.
Only at the Fair Copy stage did Mary organize her text into the
three volume form of the 1818 edition. It should be noted that
the last thirteen of the 62 pages of the Fair Copy fragments are
in Percy's hand.7

Four readily apparent lapses (three of which Macdonald and
Scherf overlook in their corrected text) are traceable to the
Last Draft. A first lapse traceable to the Last Draft occurs in
the following sentence: Safie "sickened at the prospect of
again returning to Asia, and the[n] being immured within the
walls of a haram . . ." (Rieger 119.23).8 Macdonald and
Scherf unnecessarily change "haram" to "harem" ("haram," as the
OED indicates, is a legitimate variant)9 but they overlook the real error,
the missing "n," which is also missing on the corresponding page
60 of Vol- {25} ume II of the Last Draft and must also have been
absent in the no-longer-extant corresponding portion of the Fair
Copy. In 1823 "and the being immured" was altered to "and being
immured," and the alteration carried through to the 1831
edition.

A second lapse traceable to the Last Draft (and a second
overlooked by Macdonald and Scherf) appears in this statement in
the 1818 edition: "My wife and my sister will never recover
their horror" (Rieger
134.16-17). The missing "from" here is also missing in the
corresponding passage on page 80 of Volume II of the Last Draft
and was not in fact inserted until the 1831 edition. All four
of the collations of the 1818 and 1831 editions published to
date fail to record this variant.10

The third mistake -- "Gower" (Rieger 157.11) -- is traceable
to page 111 of Volume II of the Last Draft. William Godwin, Mary's father,
or Mary herself corrected it to "Goring" (for George, Baron
Goring, 1608-57) in the 1823 edition, a correction carried
through to that of 1831.

A fourth readily apparent mistake (and a third overlooked by
Macdonald and Scherf) is the first single form "was" in the
following sentence: "Vegetables and bread, when they indulged
in such luxuries, and even fresh water, was to be procured from
the main land, which was about five miles distant" (Rieger 161.15-17). The same
grammatical mistake appears on page 116 of Volume II of the Last
Draft and must also have appeared in the Fair Copy. The plural
form "were" should be substituted in an ideal critical text of
Frankenstein, whether of the 1818, the 1823, or the 1831
editions. The same grammatical error appears in all of them.

There is a problematical just possible fifth
mistake-traceable-to-the-Last-Draft to be considered in a
quotation from Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner."
Frankenstein describes how he "hurried on with irregular steps,
not daring to look about me" [1.4.4]:

Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turn'd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

{26} Mary Shelley seems here (and in the 1823 and 1831 editions)
to be quoting from the original version of the poem published in
the 1798Lyrical
Ballads. However, the opening line of the stanza quoted
there reads as follows: "Like one, that on a lonely road
. . ."11 Did Mary
intentionally or accidentally change "that" to "who"?
Interestingly, the Last Draft version of the stanza on page 79
of Volume 1, does not follow the 1798 Lyrical Ballads
text; instead, it essentially conforms to that stanza in
Coleridge's revised versions, published in the 1800, 1802, and 1805 editions of
Lyrical Ballads; and to that stanza in the final revision
published in 1817 in
Sibylline Leaves, and in all subsequent editions of his
poetry:

"Like one who on a lon[e]some road
"Doth walk in Scar and dread
"And having once turned round walks on
"Wal And turns no more his head
"Because he knows a frightful fiend
"Doth close behind him tread."

But the same "mistake" is present: "who" appears instead of
"that". The first line of this stanza in the 1800, 1802, 1805,
or 1817 texts reads as follows: "Like one, that on a lonesome
road . . ."12

The question arises, should Mary's quotation from "The Ancient Mariner" be
corrected to conform with the 1798 Lyrical Ballads
"Ancient Mariner" stanza?13 I would answer "no."
Frankenstein's apparent misquotation can be justified as
indicative of the frailty of his human memory or as contextual
paraphrase, but the possibility should also be considered that
no misquotation is actually involved. Jim Mays, who has found
approximately 300 new Coleridge poems in the
twenty years of research that will eventuate in his three-volume
edition of Coleridge's poems, has discovered, "Where there were
10 Ancient Mariners, there are now more than 100, a poetry
editor's nightmare."14 Mary Shelley might well have had
access to one or more of the ninety-plus other versions.

I turn now from mistakes traceable to the Last Draft to mistakes
that may be corrected by the Last Draft. Of the twelve
corrections sanctioned by the Last Draft, four were made,
presumably by Mary, for the second and/or third editions of
Frankenstein. {27} These mistakes may variously have
been introduced at the Fair Copy stage (or at the proofing stage
by Percy?) or they may be typesetter's errors. None of the
relevant portions of the Fair Copy have survived. (1) The
misspelling "Ingoldstadt" at Rieger 61.19 and repeated at 65.9, which Mary corrected to
"Ingolstadt" in 1831, does not occur on the corresponding pages
92 and 100 of Volume I of the Last Draft. (2) The spelling "De
Lacy" at Rieger 128.17,
initiating a series replacing the previous "De Lacey." On the
corresponding page 70 of Volume II of the Last Draft, Mary uses
the form "de Lacey," and, in the pages following, the form "De
Lacey" consistently appears. "De Lacy" was corrected to "De
Lacey" in the 1823 edition and the corrections were carried into
the 1831 edition. (3) The blatant omission "of my" from "the
scene labours" (Rieger
161.9), does not occur on the corresponding passage on page
116 of Volume II of the Last Draft ("the scene of my labour").
Oddly, the same omission appears in the 1823 edition; the
correction was not made until 1831. (4) The date "September
19th" (Rieger 213.27) should
be "September 9th." ("September 9th" appears in the Last Draft
on page 193 of Volume II.) The correct date appears in both the
1823 and 1831 editions.

There are eight preferred readings in the Last Draft which have
not yet appeared in any published text of Frankenstein.
Two of them have previously been proposed by E. B. Murray in his pioneering 1978
account of the Frankenstein manuscripts in terms of Percy Shelley's
contribution.15 The first of these, in narrative
order, is to be found in this passage on page 198 of Volume II
of the Last Draft: "And do you think, said the dæmon that
I was then dead to anguish & remorse?" On page 179 of
Percy's corresponding portion of the Fair Copy, which is
substantively what appears in the 1818 and all subsequent
editions of Frankenstein, this becomes, "And do you dream
-- said the Dæmon, do you think that I was then dead to
agony and remorse" (cf. Rieger
217.19-20). Murray
comments: "The italicized 'I' in the rough draft is
rhetorically apt and probably should be restored as Mary's first
and best intention."16 I agree.

Murray's second mistake-correctable-from-the-Last Draft appears
in the fifth paragraph before the novel ends; the monster
recalls that "I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and
{28} devotion" (Rieger
219.65). The question begged, of course, is "devotion" to
what? On page 200 of Volume II of the Last Draft, in place of
"devotion" the compound "self devotion" appears; the
corresponding page 183 of the Fair Copy, which is in Percy
Shelley's hand, has "lf devotion." The fragment "lf" (i.e.,
[se]lf) appears because, in separating the leaves of notebook
bifolia, the scissored edges of Percy's pages 181 to 186 cut off
the ends (on the recto pages) or the beginnings (on the verso
pages) of some of the transcribed words; only two pages (185 and
186) of a series of pages in Mary's hand, which presumably
recopied these damaged pages for the printer, survive (Mary's
duplicate copy starts in the paragraph immediately following the
one here relevant and corresponds to Rieger 219.18-220.8).

Murray argues, I believe
correctly, that "the progressive loss of self" culminating in
the word's disappearance in the 1818 and all subsequent
editions, came about because Mary, in recopying Percy's
imperfect Fair Copy missed "one substantive . . . the
curtailed 'self'."17 In claiming "self-devotion" here,
the monster may be understood as reinforcing his doppelgänger relation
with Frankenstein, whom he describes, a couple of pages earlier,
as a "generous and self-devoted being!" (Rieger 217.23).

As a result of my transcription and collation work, five
remaining errors in all of the three editions of
Frankenstein, and a sixth in the third, can now be
identified for the first time, and corrected from the Last
Draft. I shall discuss them in order of ascending interest and
importance.

There are two relatively minor emendations which should probably
be made. On page 149 of Volume II of the Last Draft
Frankenstein affirms "they all died by my hand[.]" In the 1818
edition "hand" appears as the unidiomatic "hands" (Rieger 182.22), perhaps as the
result of a confusion with the alternative idiomatic form "at my
hands." The same likely error appears in the 1823 and 1831
editions. As for the second minor emendation, it should be made
in the unidiomatic verifying comment that Walton makes in his
concluding communication to his sister: "Such a monster has
then really existence" (Rieger
207.17). The corresponding line on page 184 of Volume II of
the Last Draft includes two revisions: "Such a monster
did ^has^ then {29} really
existence"[.] The Fair Copy of this portion of the Last Draft
has survived and on page 154 Mary apparently miscopied
"really" as "really" and hence the error in the
1818, 1823, and 1831 editions.

There is a further minor emendation which I considered but
finally rejected. On page 150 of Volume II of the Last Draft
Frankenstein refers to "my journey to the Sea of Ice" (Mary's
translation of the French place name "Mer de Glace" which is nowhere used
in the novel). In the 1818 edition "Sea of Ice" appears as "sea
of ice" (Rieger 183.33). The
same lower case form appears earlier at Rieger 93.13 and on page 152 of
Volume I of the Rough Draft. Both instances remain lower case
in the 1823 and 1831 editions. Given the inconsistent manuscript
evidence, the matter is arguable; since the place name does
exist, there is a case for the capitalized form of the English
translation in both instances. It seems more likely, however,
that although Mary is referring to the Mer de Glace, she finally
wished the phrase "sea of ice" to be understood as simply
descriptive at both Rieger 93.13 and 183.33.

The first of the four more significant unidentified mistakes
occurs in the following sentence related to Frankenstein's
dilemma:

I wandered like an evil spirit, for I had committed deeds of
mischief beyond description horrible, and more, much more, (I
persuaded myself) was yet behind." (Rieger 85.7-9)

Exactly the same sentence appears in the 1823 and 1831
editions. In a note keyed to the word "behind," Leonard Wolf
makes the following comment in his Annotated
Frankenstein:

This is a puzzling locution. Its intent seems to be to say
"much more was yet to come." Perhaps our author intended a
metaphor as in "More, much more . . . was yet behind
the veil of the future." (Wolf's ellipsis)18

Wolf could have spared himself this tortured hypothesis had he
simply looked at his facing page reproduction of the
corresponding Last Draft page (page 138 of Volume I). In place
of "behind," the Last Draft has the words "in store." Wolf's
oversight here is little short of extraordinary. Quite possibly
Mary intended to substitute the word "ahead" as a synonym for
"in store" and {30} mistakenly substituted the direct antonym of
"ahead." Although Mary herself may have introduced the error in
her Fair Copy (as a result of some mental aberration?), and
although it was not corrected in either the 1823 or the 1831
editions, there can surely be no doubt that "in store" is the
preferred reading.

Another rather peculiar unidentified error occurs in the
following sentence related to the monster:

As night advanced, I placed a variety of combustibles around the
cottage; and, after having destroyed every vestige of
cultivation in the garden, I waited with forced impatience until
the moon had sunk to commence my operations. (Rieger 134.35-135.4)

Again, exactly the same sentence appears in the 1823 and 1831
editions. In place of the nonsensical "forced impatience," the
Last Draft, on page 81 of Volume II, has "forced patience." Once
more, what Mary wrote in her Last Draft is clearly correct and
what appears in all printed texts of Frankenstein is
clearly a nonsensical error. Mary's Last Draft variant is again
to be preferred and should be substituted in any ideal critical
text of Frankenstein.

Before concluding with the perhaps most interesting of the more
significant errors that can be corrected by the Last Draft --
two dating slips -- it is
appropriate to note that another chronological pointer is not
the error that one scholar has supposed -- in spite of its
apparent correction in the Last Draft! On his return to Geneva after a prolonged
absence at university, Frankenstein observes: "Six years had
elapsed, passed as a dream . . . and I stood in the
same place where I had last embraced my father before my
departure for Ingolstadt" (Rieger
73.10-11). Leonard Wolf, in an annotation to this statement
in The Essential Frankenstein (which is not in his
original version, The Annotated Frankenstein), corrects
the "Six years" to "five."19 There are two other similarly
altered references to the same period of time in both the Last
Draft and in all the published editions: "nearly five years"
(Vol. I, p. 108) and "nearly six years" (Rieger 69.21); "Five years"
(Vol. I, p. 120) and "Six years" (Rieger 75.27).

In the annotation immediately preceding his correction of "Six
years" to "five," Wolf includes a chronology which purports to
demonstrate that, in spite of Frankenstein's references to three
{31} successive periods of two, or nearly two years (something
of a creative tic on Mary Shelley's part since a fourth two year
period will later be specified [Rieger 46.9, 52.25, 72.11, and later 151.15-6]), the actual elapsed
time between Frankenstein's departure for Ingolstadt and his return to
Geneva is closer to five
years. Here then, "Mary Shelley creates a perplexity."20 She in fact
does not; the elapsed time appears to be about five years and
six months (the third two year period, a "nearly" one [Rieger 72.11], runs from the
November of the monster's animation to the year after-next May
of the servant Justine's arraignment for murder). In the Last
Draft Mary rounded the figure down; for the 1818 and all
subsequent editions, that figure was simply rounded up.

A real chronological error, the dating problem with regard to
Frankenstein and Clerval's arrival in England, is apparent to
any careful reader. At the end of Chapter 1 of Volume Two
[Three], Frankenstein observes, "It was on a clear morning, in the latter days of
December, that I first saw the white cliffs of Britain" (Rieger 154.31-32). In the next
chapter he states that "We had arrived in England at the
beginning of October . . ." (Rieger 156.24). Leonard Wolf
notes that

Readers attempting to keep track of Victor's calendar must
decide here which date to accept. For the sake of symmetry,
this editor will continue to work with the October date. The
choice of October seems reasonable too because it fits the
assertion that Victor and Clerval spent some or several months
in London.21

As I demonstrate below, Wolf made the right choice but in his
appendix, "A Chronology of Events in Frankenstein," he
reverses himself and has Victor and Clerval arriving in England
at the "end of December."22 Chronological incoherence is
clearly catching.

There are several date and time variants in the Last Draft of
Frankenstein where the passage of time is advanced in the
1818 and subsequent editions. In this case, page 107 of Volume
II of the Last Draft has Frankenstein and Clerval see the white
cliffs of Dover "in the latter ^days^ of September" ("days" is
an above-the-line insert), and the later page 110, like the 1818
and all subsequent editions, specifies "the beginning of
October. . ." Since "the latter ^days^ of September
is contiguous with "the {32} beginning of October," the Last
Draft "September" is much to be preferred over the published
"December." Clearly, "December" in the 1818 edition (at Rieger 156.24), and in the 1823
and 1831 editions, is a mistake which originated at the Fair
Copy, typesetting, or proofing stages. The end of September
date is consistent with Frankenstein and Clerval's previous
activity. They were traveling down the Rhine "at the time of the
vintage" (Rieger 152.28)
before crossing Holland by post coach and then setting sail for
England. As Wolf notes,
"the time of the vintage" is "late August, early September."23 In other
words, the journey down the Rhine and across Holland took a
realistic three to four weeks.

The "December" in place of "September" mistake in the 1818
edition was compounded in that of 1831. In the Last Draft and
in the 1818 and 1823 editions, Frankenstein and Clerval leave Geneva for England "in the latter end of
August" (Volume II, page 102A
[there is a previous page 102]; Rieger 151.15), a date
consistent with the Last Draft arrival in late September. In
the corresponding passage in the 1831 edition, "September"
replaces "August" (Rieger ["Collation of the Texts of 1818 and
1831"] 253) presumably to
accord more plausibly with the erroneous late December date of
arrival. In the 1831 edition then the departure date should be
corrected to conform with that in the Last Draft and the 1818
and 1823 editions (a fourth preferred reading of particular
interest), and the arrival date should be corrected (as in the
1818 and 1823 editions) to conform with that in the Last
Draft.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no further substantive
emendations to the three editions of Frankenstein (or
just the third) that can be justified in terms of the Last Draft
(and/or the Fair Copy). In due course, seven of the emendations
that I have here suggested (in two cases seconding Murray) will
no doubt be made in an as-near-perfect-as-possible critical text
of the 1818 edition; the eighth, of course, could only be made
in a critical text of the 1831 edition. Mary Shelley's literary
"progeny" will then be no less "hideous"24 but some of its worrying minor
blemishes will have disappeared.

6. Unfortunately, from the evidence of their
edition, Macdonald and Scherf must have been unaware of E. B. Murray's "Changes in the 1823
Edition of Frankenstein," Library, Sixth Series, 3
(1981): 320-27. Murray argues that Mary's father, William Godwin, was most
probably responsible for the 114 substantive changes tabulated
and that Mary used the 1823 edition "as the basis of her
copytext for her third edition revisions" (323). I think it likely that Mary
was at least cognizant of three of the changes in the 1823
edition -- the normalizations of "De Lacy" to "De Lacey," the
substitution of "Goring" for "Gower" and the date change from
"September l9th" to "September 9th." Those are surely the kind
of mistakes that she would quickly have become aware of after
the book's first publication. I have relied on Murray's list of
1823 substantive variants (320-23) for dating the relevant
Frankenstein revisions.

7. See Dep.c.477/1 (Volume I of the Last Draft)
and Dep.c.534/1 (Volume 11 of the Last Draft), and Dep.c.534/2
("the Fair Copy fragments) in The Abinger Deposit: Papers of P. B. Shelley, W. Godwin, and Their Circle
(Bodleian Library, Oxford). For a full description of this
material, see my article "(De)Composing Frankenstein:
The Import of Altered Character Names in the Last Draft," which
is forthcoming in the 1996 Studies in Bibliography. I am
grateful to Lord Abinger for his kind permission to publish
quotations from the Frankenstein manuscripts. And I am
grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada for a 1992-95 Research Grant which made it possible
for me to create the first diplomatic transcription of those
manuscripts.

8. All quotations from Rieger's text (see note 2
above) have been checked against the facsimile of the 1818
edition available in The Annotated Frankenstein, ed.
Leonard Wolf (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1977).

10. In addition to the collations (230-59;
200-28; 317-59) in Rieger's, Butler's, and Macdonald and
Scherf's editions of the 1818 text (see notes 2, 4, and 5
above), there is a select collation of the 1818 and 1831
editions in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern
Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle second edition (London:
Penguin, 1992) 217-26. What is required, of course, is a
collation of the 1818 and 1823 texts and then a collation
of the 1823 and 1831 texts (see note 6 above).

Since Macdonald and Scherf's collation is the most complete and
they claim to "list all the substantive variants between
the 1818 and 1831 versions of Frankenstein" (317; my
emphasis), it should be noted that they also omit the following
five substantive variants: at 69.13 of their 1818 text, "my
most" (as on page 2 of an insert to Volume I of the Last Draft)
became "my" in 1831; a missing "Then" at 134.11 (it appears on
page 7 of Volume 11 of the Last Draft) was restored in 1823 and
the correction (also made in the Macdonald and Scherf text)
carried into the 1831 text; "Turk" at 153.11 (and page 62 of
Volume 11 of the Last Draft) mistakenly became "Turks" in the
1831 text; "Gower" at 186.34 (and on page 111 of Volume 11 of
the Last Draft) was corrected to "Goring" in 1823 and the
correction (also made in the Macdonald and Scherf text) carried
into the 1831 text; and "September 19th" at 240.3 was corrected
to "September 9th " (as it appears on page 193 of Volume 11 of
the Last Draft) in 1823 and the correction (also made in the
Macdonald and Scherf text) carried into the 1831 text.

13. The following three recent Penguin editions
of the 1831 text have in fact "corrected" the 1798 stanza. The
1994 Popular Classics edition and the Film and T.V. Tie-in
edition both replace it with that which Coleridge first published
in 1800 (both page 57). Maurice Hindle, in his 1992 edition,
apparently substitutes the 1800 stanza with a variant opening
line: "Like one, on a lonesome road who. . ."
(58).

14. Nick Brooks and Tim Rayment, "Found: 300
Coleridge poems," The Sunday Times 12 February 1995:
Section I, p. 3. Jim Mays informs me that he "has not so far
discovered a version [of "The
Ancient Mariner"] which corresponds to Mary Shelley's but
this is not to say such a version does not exist" (letter to
Ketterer, 13 March 1995).